Unfortunately it looks like I've now fallen into this trap. My mid-2010 mini server (with Lion) froze hard a few weeks ago. I was on a trip and since coming back, I would get it to work and it would seem OK, then crash hard again, or worse, seem to freeze but would actually continue to execute clicks but only extremely slowly (like an action in 30 minutes), until I just cut the power. I opened the logs via console and saw lots of disk IO errors. I googled it, and ended up at this discussion and based on what I saw here I decided to turn FileVault off. Well, halfway through, it failed. I booted into recovery mode, but I'm unable to run repair disk on the boot volume (greyed out). Verify disk is not greyed out but does nothing. I rebooted and now on the apple logo, I get a progress bar at the bottom, which grows for a while and then the Mac just clicks off. So now I can't even boot! Arrrgh. It's just my media machine, so it won't be too tragic, just a major PITA. What I don't know at this point though is if the drive is actually OK (in which case I suppose I can still boot into recovery mode and reinstall the OS?) or if the hard drive is actually failing.

1. I re-downloaded the Lion installer, and then installed it to an external USB drive.

2. I booted the mini using the external drive, and moved the important stuff from the dying partition to another drive. (Because it was accessible, turning FileVault off did "stick" but the partition, or drive, was messed up. Because the recover partition worked just fine, I figured it was the partition that was borked.)

3. Using disk utility, I blew away the dying partition. Actually, at first I "erased" it but it still showed up as locked, so, after much trial and error, I was able to finally blow away the partition.

4. I created a fresh partition.

5. I reinstalled Lion and did basic configurations.

Basically, I blew it all away and started over. And I'm leaving FileVault off.

The good news out of all this is that I'm running regular Lion instead of server (I didn't need server), and everything seems snappier now. And I didn't lose any data.

I have seen the same thing with my 2009 MacBook Pro. I tried reformating the hard drive and reinstalling lion (from external hard drive), but the encryption still failed. Got the same error messages in the Kernel log:

Yup. Same problem here. Still no fix in sight other than reinstalling. I can't because the crappy superdrive on the non unibody mac will eat the disc and not read it. Possibly, I'd like to boot off USB but I don't believe this is an option. Another curse Jobs left us with.

It is pretty obvious you got hardware I/O errors, and no software can fix such hardware errors. You can use Target Disk Mode to connect it to another Mac and install OS on it. But you want to make sure the drive is not fault.

HFS+ does not complain about I/O errors because HFS+ does not have checksums or anything like that (so you get silent data corruption). File Vault actually checks and makes sure you are not losing more data by enabling encryption, and that's why it refuses to finish encrypting.

It's not obvius as I ran fsck and the disk is clean. The only problems were from Filevalut messing it up after I ran it which I fixed before doing the clean install. It's a journaling file system anyways so it would recover automatically. It did on my other mac.

tl;dr: If filevalut doesn't check BEFORE encrypting leaving the system in an unusable state is terrible engineering and terrible QA on Apple's part. But then again, what else is new?

fsck_hfs does not check free blocks on the disk, but File Vault check and encrypt every sector on disk, including free blocks. When File Vault fails, is your system unbootable? All other user's problem is that their system can still use although only half of the disk is encrypted.

No after fskc'ing it it was bootable again in an unknown state. To me, that's unusable. Anyway, it's what it is. I'm not going to use this feature anymore. It's cost me days of work because of the bad engineering of such a critical feature.

Are you saying that fsck_hfs made it bootable, and before fsck_hfs, it is not booting? If yes, then you are seeing a totally different problem than others on this thread. Other people's volume are bootable and useable without using fsck.

More Like This

Retrieving data ...

This site contains user submitted content, comments and opinions and is for informational purposes only.
Apple may provide or recommend responses as a possible solution based on the information provided; every potential issue may involve several factors not detailed in the conversations captured in an electronic forum and Apple can therefore provide no guarantee as to the efficacy of any proposed solutions on the community forums.
Apple disclaims any and all liability for the acts, omissions and conduct of any third parties in connection with or related to your use of the site. All postings and use of the content on this site are subject to the Apple Support Communities Terms of Use.